Introducing Confluence Enterprise

Bill Arconati

6 years ago

Along with today’s of launch Confluence 4.3, our biggest Confluence release ever, we’re proud to announce that we have expanded Atlassian’s portfolio of Enterprise offerings with the introduction of Confluence Enterprise, a new offering tailored to the needs of our largest Confluence customers.

Our commitment to the enterprise

While the introduction of Enterprise offerings at Atlassian is new, enterprises have been using Confluence for a long time, and Confluence is found in most enterprises – almost half of the US Fortune 100 companies use Confluence, from the likes of Cisco to Boeing. Our enterprise customers are extremely important to us and we are committed to improving not only the services and support offering we provide to them, but also to enhancing the experience for their users. We all know that happy users = happy admins

Benefits of being an Atlassian Enterprise customer

Ever since we introduced Jira Enterprise earlier this year we’ve been listening to customer feedback about how we can improve the offering to better serve the specific needs of our enterprise customers. We want to thank everyone for their valuable, and at times candid, feedback. It’s helped us evolve the Atlassian Enterprise offering and we wouldn’t be where we are today without the support of our customers.

Today, Atlassian Enterprise customers receive the following benefits:

It keeps getting better

We’re dedicated to improving the experience for our enterprise customers and giving you more and more opportunities to succeed. Since the introduction of Jira Enterprise we’ve made some significant progress.

More Personalized Support

With 24 x 7 phone and online support, Atlassian is ready and on-hand to help our Enterprise customers through the weekend upgrade, or the late night change you want to make. In addition, we now offer a more personalized support experience. For each of our Enterprise customers we’ve built an enterprise customer profile, so our Enterprise Support team knows more about you than just what products you own and the ticket you’ve just submitted.

Enterprise Customer Community Launch

We just held our first ever Jira Enterprise Webinar, a chance for our Enterprise customers to connect with the Jira Product Management team and discuss the latest updates in the world of Jira specifically related to our large, enterprise customer deployments. The first Confluence Enterprise Webinar is scheduled to be held sometime in January.

New Enterprise Workshops

Atlassian Enterprise customers now have access to an on-going series of best-practice workshops to help them succeed in using our products in enterprise environments. The first of these workshops will be on the topic of Enterprise User Management and is scheduled to be held in mid November. Stay tuned for updates.

Enterprise Resources

We recently published a detailed guide that walks through how to configure Confluence for improved performance when running Confluence at scale. This is our first in a series of Enterprise Resources that we will continue to maintain to help ensure success of your Confluence Enterprise deployment.

The Atlassian Enterprise family is young and growing, fast. We’re constantly learning how we can continue to add value to our customers each and everyday. Please keep the feedback coming.

The Confluence Enterprise journey

While Confluence Enterprise is a new offering, we’ve been listening and learning from our existing customers that have mission-critical instances of Confluence in enterprise environments for many years. When we look at all of the feedback we’ve gathered over the years, the issues faced by our larger customers can be grouped into three key areas.

We’ve been busy

These are the areas which we will be focusing on moving forward. In fact, we’ve already started. Over the last couple of years we’ve been making improvements to Confluence to address these issues.

End user adoption

Our largest customers have continuously told us that they’re biggest goal is adoption. They have thousands of users and don’t have the resources to train all their end users on how to use Confluence. So we’ve consistently worked to make Confluence simple and intuitive for EVERYONE, not just technical users. With Confluence 4.0 started to address the number one barrier to adoption…the wiki markup editor. In doing so we delivered to you a simplified WYSIWYG editor designed for power users and non-technical users alike. And we’ve continued to invest in the editor, recently adding features like table cell highlighting, drag and drop macros and WYSIWYG page templates in 4.3.

We also have a number of general design improvements coming that we think will drastically simplify Confluence for your users, allowing them to understand and use Confluence with little or no help. Enterprise customers also have free access to end user training through Atlassian University.

Managing lots of users

When you run software within the enterprise, not only does it need to support thousands of users, it needs to make it easy for administrators to manage these users. User management is an area where we’ve progress the past few releases.

Also released in Confluence 3.5, for the large number of customers that use Confluence alongside Jira we allowed you to reduce complexity with your setup and give your users one username and password for both applications by delegating user management to Jira.

Default space permissions

Confluence Administrators now have complete control over the default permissions applied to newly created spaces saving them the headache of having to update the permissions for every new space created by users who have the Create Space permission.

Managing lots of content

Where you have lots of users, you generally have lots of content. The two go hand in hand and it’s a sign of healthy adoption. We’ve heard from many of our enterprise customers that they want more ways to mange all the great content their users are creating. It’s early days, but in our past two releases we have addressed some long-standing feature requests that help you tame your content.

Space archiving

With 4.3, we’ve made it easy to archive spaces that may house completed projects, old teams, or out-of-date documentation. To archive a space, simply go to the Space Admin console, and change the status of your Space from Current to Archived. Once a Space has been archived it will no longer show up in your search results, making your search results less cluttered with out-of-date content.

Remove Attachment versions

Many of you have told us that as your usage of Confluence grows so does the number of versions of files attached to Confluence, and that you want to purge some of those old Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets. Not only does every version take up valuable disk space, but there are times where you just need to remove a specific version that contains sensitive information. The good news is Confluence 4.3 helps you better manage your attached files by giving you the ability to remove specific versions of attachments.

What does the future hold?

These are just a few things we’ve done recently to improve the experience for our largest customers. We’re not finished. We’ve been getting great feedback from our enterprise and we can only ask that you keep it coming. We’re committed to building on the momentum we have and delivering an awesome experiences for administrators and end users alike. Stay tuned for more features to help boost adoption in your organization, make it easier to manage users and content, and scale your Confluence site.